Wednesday, September 7, 2016 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, September 7, 2016 // The Statement 
5B

accounts for certain sites that ask for a Face-
book login, rather than providing the opportu-
nity to make your own or use a Google login. 
But these difficulties are not enough to force 
him to join the website with 1.7 billion users.

The distaste for online relationships, Ellison 

said, is one of three reasons cited for people 
who do not have Facebook accounts. Ellison’s 
work focuses on the benefits of the social net-
work, but she pointed to other research being 
done to specifically note why some people 
choose not to have Facebook accounts.

“We’re at the point now where on a college 

campus if you’re not on Facebook, it’s probably 
because you have some reason,” Ellison said. 
“It’s not just that you haven’t heard about it.”

The other two reasons cited by those with-

out accounts include fearing productivity con-
cerns and privacy issues — as Ellison puts it: 
“what one particular company is doing with 
my data once it’s out there.”

LSA senior Katrina Rayment’s reasons have 

shifted from adolescence to young adulthood. 
At first, she struggled socially in middle and 
high school, meaning “I did not want to adver-
tise how few friends I had.” Now Rayment has 
plenty of pictures she could be tagged in. It’s 
just that she sees Facebook as a waste of time.

“Other people have told me how much time 

they spend on this one thing and that just 
seems, like, really unappealing,” Rayment 
said. “I already spend so much time wasted 
browsing the Internet; I don’t need to add, like, 
another distraction.”

The average person spends 50 minutes 

every day on Facebook, according to The New 
York Times. That’s more time than the aver-
age American spends on educational activities, 
grooming themselves, house care and real-life 
face-to-face communication, according to the 
widely cited Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Time 
Use Survey. Of all leisure activities, only televi-
sion takes up more of our time.

For college students in particular, this can 

manifest into a larger problem of procrastina-
tion. It’s a real issue — writing this article alone, 
I frequently find myself opening up a new tab 
of the site almost unconsciously. Facebook’s 
distracting qualities are so prevalent that 
researchers Adrian Meier, Leonard Reinecke 
and Christine Meltzer at the Johannes Guten-
berg University in Germany came up with 
aname for it: Facebocrastination.

Public Policy senior Graham Steffens said 

Facebook began to “go out of style” when he 
was a senior in high school. He hasn’t looked 
back since deleting his in 2013.

“I definitely have more time,” Steffens said. 

“The amount of time spent scrolling through 
your newsfeed is incredible. You don’t realize 
how much time it takes until you delete it.”

If students like Jermyn and Steffens are 

fine without it, what keeps others logged on? 
Ninety percent of those aged 18 to 29 use social 

media, according to Pew. On college campus-
es, the primary way to hear about parties and 
other campus events happening is through 
Facebook invites. In my own experience, Face-
book Events and Facebook Groups seem essen-
tial for campus life.

Unsurprisingly, that’s the major drawback 

for Steffens and those who are Facebook-free.

“I wouldn’t get invited to events where 

other people would,” Steffens said. “It just took 
extra effort to kind of go out of my way to make 
sure I heard about those, or make plans with 
people if you actually want to hang out instead 
of just having like a third party to initiate that.”

Jermyn says to get invited to events he 

either has to go out of his way to get the infor-
mation or depend on his friends for an invite.

“Even just social things, like if people would 

be having parties or something they would 
create a Facebook event, say: ‘I’ll invite you on 
Facebook,’ and I would say: ‘Well, I don’t have 
a Facebook,’ ” he said. “I probably missed out 
on some social interactions because I didn’t 
have a Facebook and I kind of just rely on other 
people to text me if there was something going 
on.”

However, not seeing events or social inter-

actions via Facebook isn’t all negative.

Steffens said he realized after leaving Face-

book the effect staring at photos of parties he 
wasn’t invited to or vacations he didn’t go on 
has on users.

“I have an overall positive experience with-

out it,” Steffens said. “The lack of FOMO — 
that’s a big thing. People can get really stressed 
out constantly looking at other people’s lives 
and compare their own lives to it. Removing 
that aspect, I think makes a happier person.”

Facebook’s inherent voyeurism, and the jeal-

ousy that can result from it, is often lamented. 
However, Ellison, the social scientist, noted 
that as a perk.

“Facebook is a window to staying connected 

with friends in kind of a lightweight manner so 
that they’re able to see what others are doing 
and feel that there’s a connection even when 

they’re not co-located,” Ellison said.

As interesting as that can be, Ellison notes 

in the short term the feature can also aid in 
building connections in real life. While non-
users like Christoph may not know what their 
friends have been up to recently, Ellison says 
users have conversation starters when they see 
them in person.

“One of the ways that we talk about that in 

our work is by making an argument that Face-
book serves as a social lubricant, and the idea 
there is essentially the information that you 
see on Facebook can then be used to kind of 
make conversation happen more fluidly when 
you do communicate through some other 
channel,” she said.

Maybe a user sees a friend post about get-

ting a puppy or visiting a new restaurant; the 
next time the user sees their Facebook friend 
in person these are starting topics of conversa-
tion. This aspect makes Christoph understand 
the appeal of Facebook; he said he never knows 
what people are up to unless he sees them day 
to day or makes an effort to reach out to them.

“My relationships are more stuck in the 

timeframe that I’ve seen the person,” Chris-
toph said. “A lot of the people that I haven’t seen 
in a long time I have no idea what they’ve done 
in the last year or so, which is unfortunate. The 
thing with Facebook is that with Snapchat you 
can see what’s going on if you’re checking it, 
but with Facebook you can see what’s going on 
today and look back three weeks ago and check 
out everything up until when they created it in 
middle school.”

Yet Steffens’ feelings of FOMO associated 

with the barrage of information still aren’t 
unfounded. Psychology Prof. Ethan Kross 
published a study in 2013 linking avid Face-
book users to higher rates of depression. His 
researchers found the more people utilized the 
social network throughout the day, the more 
their mood declined.

“We find that the more users use Facebook 

passively — i.e., browsing the site without add-
ing content — the worse they subsequently 
feel,” Kross said. “We also have some data indi-
cating that one potential explanation for this 
relationship has to do with jealousy — brows-
ing the site passively is associated with higher 
feelings of jealousy, which in turn predict peo-
ple feeling worse over time. Some researchers 
have speculated that this is because people 
curate the way they appear online.”

Keeping in mind the curation factor Kross 

referred to, the constant sharing can also be 
too much. Christoph said hearing about this 
stress from his Facebook-using friends was a 
reason he never joined.

“I feel a little less cluttered,” Christoph said. 

“I hear people complaining that Facebook is 
boring and they don’t know why they use it. 
I know people that get worried about putting 
their vacation photos on Facebook and making 

sure to share all their study abroad photos and 
stuff, so it’s kind of like people feel obligated 
to update it and keep their presence online 
fresh and update everyone. For me I don’t 
really worry about posting photos or Facebook 
drama that’s happening. It’s one less thing to 
check. I don’t have to look for Facebook mes-
sages.”

Here the benefits of Facebook become one of 

its disadvantages — this rings true for college 
students passively Facebocrastinating to avoid 
studying.

A study done by Sven Laumer, an assis-

tant professor at Otto-Friedrich University in 
Germany, validated my annoyance with Face-
book’s constant, banal notifications: Many 
users see Facebook as a place of demands 
rather than a space for interesting content to 
be shared. Users complained of feeling social 
overload when on the site because of its social 
demands and obligations, such as wishing 
“friends” a happy birthday, promote or share 
content produced by other “friends,” contrib-
ute to their fundraisers or react to their sta-
tuses.

Jermyn currently doesn’t suffer from this 

stress, nor does he foresee ever having to.

“I find that without having a Facebook, I’m 

able to keep in touch with the people I really 
want to keep in touch with,” Jermyn said. 
“The other people who maybe I wasn’t as good 
of friends with or whatever in high school, if 
I really want to get in touch with them, I can 
get in touch with them, but I don’t think that I 
really need a Facebook to make sure that I can 
do that.”

Sure, Jermyn will be the only classmate at 

his high school reunion shocked at how his 
classmates have aged. He may miss seeing 
where his acquaintances went over Spring 
Break, or hearing about so-and-so’s new job, 
but he’s content. The Facebook-less are fine 
without it; despite being disconnected online, 
they’d still pass on an online interaction to one 
face-to-face.

W

hen Will Jermyn was in seventh 
grade, he did what many 2007 mid-
dle schoolers did — he set up a Face-

book account.

But unlike most other 7th-graders, the Face-

book Jermyn created was for his mom, not 
himself. Jermyn, a Public Policy junior, used 
his email to make it. He didn’t know many oth-
ers on the site at the time and thought it would 
be too much effort to create a new email.

Jermyn has cycled through several new 

email accounts in the nine years since then, 
but he still hasn’t found a reason to create a 
Facebook. As the popularity of the social net-
work grew and more of his classmates used the 
site to organize events after school or created 
groups for clubs, he considered making one 
but found he was always fine without it. He 
said he has realized at times that his life would 
be easier with an account, but the extra work 
that came with not having one — like having to 
go out of his way to make sure he knew about 
events happening — didn’t outweigh his feeling 
that it wasn’t essential.

“I just never really decided to get one,” he 

said. “There were definitely a lot of instances 
where I was like, I should have one with differ-
ent clubs and stuff and different teams. Using 
Facebook was kind of like a big way that every-
one communicated.”

Jermyn is outgoing, but prefers to stay in. He 

has a good group of core friends, whom he says 
he relies on to hear about things going on on 
campus — whether they be events or the daily 
doings of one’s friends. The ubiquity of Face-
book as a tool for communication is something 
Information Prof. Nichole Ellison studies at the 
University of Michigan. She said its popularity 
and utility have made it a “common language,” 
but also come with the drawbacks of the hav-
ing a life online: how much time it takes. 

“Facebook is kind of one-stop shopping,” 

Ellison said. “For many people, that’s where 
all their friends are. So you have the cell phone 
numbers of some of your friends, but not all, 
or you’re on Snapchat with some of them, but 
not all, but Facebook is kind of like a common 
language. Facebook does of course have these 
coordination features, like planning events, 
that kind of lower the barrier to that kind of 
work.”

I had the opposite experience of Jermyn: 

In seventh grade, my mom set up my account. 
Today, the way I utilize Facebook has shifted — 
as I’m sure it has for most users as the site has 
moved to expand. It’s gone from a place where 
my double-digit amount of classmates post-
ed gawky photos and messaged after school 
before I had a phone, to what is now essentially 
a database of everyone I know. The ability to 
“unfollow” users makes it more personable, but 
the experience is less genuine. Though there’s 
nothing which particularly attracts me to the 
site, it’s hard to imagine life without it. I am 

not a fan of memes or 30-second cooking tuto-
rials, nor do I enjoy flipping through tagged 
photos of people from my middle school. Day 
to day, Facebook for me is often banal. Log on, 
see the same active users, hear about an event, 
check my notifications, close browser. It’s not 
an activity I want to do, need to do, or look 
forward to doing, it’s something I just do. It’s 
normal.

Even the activity of keeping up with 1,200 

Facebook “friends” can be exhausting, with 
the exhausting yet ultimately appealing voy-
eurism that is Facebook stalking. There is also 
the issue of fretting about one’s own appear-
ance — the fundamentally fruitless concerns 
over how many “likes” a new profile picture or 
status receives. These are social anxieties that, 
regardless of Facebook, we all experience, but 
are amplified on the site.

Jermyn has never had to deal with that. 

His friends are actually his friends, and he’s 
not pretending to have a four-digit amount of 
them.

“One aversion to Facebook that I’ve had is it 

is very easy to connect with people and the idea 
of having thousands and thousands of friends 
or something — I don’t know if I ever really 
liked that kind of idea,” Jermyn said. “For me, 
I’m more about having a few close friends that 
you text with and that you hang out with on 
a regular basis instead of having this large, 
expansive network that’s maybe people that 
you aren’t as willing to hang out with frequent-
ly, maybe you see them like once every now and 
then, but not on a regular basis.”

He added that if a club or a job required him 

to make one, he would, but for personal use, 
probably not. He’s content with the friends 
he has in real life, and doesn’t understand the 
appeal of having lots of “friends” online.

Yet Facebook seems critical; for many, it’s 

hard to imagine a world without it. Whenev-
er a new social media app is created, it seems 
Facebook ends up buying it — take how Face-
book Live emulated Periscope, or how mov-
ing Messenger to a separate app put it at odds 
with other popular messaging applications like 
Whatsapp. The site bought out picture-sharing 
app Instagram in 2012 and recently launched 
“Instagram stories,” mimicking the opera-
tives of Snapchat. According to a Pew survey 
conducted in September 2014, Facebook is the 
most used social media site.

That ubiquity has made lives like LSA junior 

Hiro Christoph’s difficult, even in minor ways. 
I was surprised he didn’t have a Facebook — 
he’s an RA, known for being personable and 
kind. Christoph seems like the kind of person 
who would get hundreds of likes on his profile 
picture. Influenced by his parents, who were 
always adamantly against him having a Face-
book, he never logged on.

He noted that he has faced some difficulties 

not having one, such as being unable to make 

dis
con
nec
ted

By Emma 

Kinery, 

Daily News 

Editor

It’s not an activity 
I want to do, need 
to do, or look 
forward to doing, 
it’s something 
I just do. It’s 
normal.

